Procedural formalism-barrier to or facilitator of growth?

 

Bernd Hayo and Stefan Voigt (Marburg) have posted a paper to SSRN here taking issue with the deregulatory reccomendations of the Lex Mundi project authors.  That earlier work had introduced the concept of "procedural formalism" which, it was argued, constrained growth.  Predictably, civil law systems were seen as inherently more formalistic: one of the components of the formalism index, for example, was written as opposed to oral trial procedures.  Thus the result tracked the general "legal origins" result that the common law is good and the civil law tradition bad.  Hayo and Voigt produce a more nuanced result by breaking down the formalism index into its component parts. They find that some components are associated with growth while others are not, providing a more nuanced take on the data.